After completing Finance 1 and Finance 2 or Accelerated Corporate Finance, you are ready to begin your finance electives. Most students concentrate on the asset pricing or corporate finance courses depending upon their long term goals. However, it is useful to take at least some courses from both lists, as you will likely need knowledge in both asset pricing and corporate finance in your career. You will also need to take an asset pricing course from the short list to obtain a finance major. Finance 1 and 2 or Accelerated Corporate Finance provides you with the fundamental corporate finance knowledge. The advanced courses give you greater depth. They also let you practice. What will set you apart from the competition is practice, practice, practice. The more you practice, the more new situations will look familiar and thus you will have a framework for attacking the problem.
To help you in planning your course work at Kellogg, the full list of finance courses have been posted on the web. On the Finance department web page, there are also lists of courses that the department strongly suggest you take or that they strongly suggest you consider by career track. The syllabus for each course can be found online for each quarter's courses as well. The schedule for the next academic year has been posted to the web. Since some advanced electives are offered in only one or two quarters a year, you should tentatively plan your schedule for the full year. When you are considering an advanced finance course, I strongly recommend that you do your due diligence – read the material and then follow up with the faculty to understand the course material and who it is targeted toward.